


Do Roses Know Their Thorns Can Hurt?

by homo_pink



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Body Horror, First Kiss, First Time, M/M, Pining Sam, behind the scenes gore, cartoon horror, pet spider, taxidermy animals, true crime references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 15:13:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10126589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homo_pink/pseuds/homo_pink
Summary: Dean needs a new body part and Sam doesn't cope well with any of it.(A very AU!AU borrowing the lovely idea fromTime Is on My Side- somewhat Burton inspired and super unserious.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> for spn-reversebang - inspired by siennavie's incredibly beautiful [art](http://siennavie.livejournal.com/95840.html) ♡ ♡ ♡

The roses that grew outside were still roses, for the most part. 

Red like anatomy and fragrant as sex, but they had a downwards lean, droopy, almost as though they were mournful. Even upon first budding blossom, there was a mildew upon them that just wouldn’t depart, powdery fine and filmy to touch. 

Dean said it was a fungus, leave ‘em alone, Sammy — but Dean thought everything was a germ, something to be wiped out, maybe. Sam knew, secretly, that they were omens. 

The roses and the beetles and the way the old ovaled mirrors misted over, refusing to reflect. The gathering of blackbirds that crowed and cawed but all stayed at the edge of the yard like demons vs. salt. Sam worked really hard on his birdfeeders, used a steady hand and a tender heart, but the little houses never saw a feather. They swayed only with wind.

The worms, for what it was worth, had never minded coming in close. It was a placid kind of pleasant. But then, they were much more accustomed to dust and dirt and dried out dead things. 

 

~

 

Dean was fiddling with the ribbon spool cover on a creaky typewriter when Sam came back in from his morning garden-walk. It wasn't much of a garden — just waterless old cherub fountains and long, rotting elderly limb-like vines — but it was still nice. Sam was sure it used to be nice. 

“I think it’s haunted,” Dean said, punching a couple of keys spitefully.

“What? The typewriter?” Sam pet at a tiny spider that’d fallen down onto his forearm and wandered over to Dean. “Dude, c’mon. Just because you can’t get it to work doesn’t mean—”

“It’s not me that’s the problem here, alright? Look. Knobs are fine, the scale’s adjusted. Has ink. I even remembered to put a sheet of paper in this time, Samuel.” 

He prodded at the letter _S_ (tap, tap, tap, tap, groan) and though it moved and danced and even hissed a little, the paper was as empty as an old coffin. 

Sam hmmed. And then he reached over to try it out for himself. The letter _D_ folded down repeatedly but, as expected, the page remained blank and mute, significantly vacant. 

“That’s unusual,” Sam said, like agreeing, but rushed on before Dean could a-ha! and scramble to the kitchen for the antiquated silver salt shaker. “But not paranormal.” 

Dean frowned his 8-year-old boy frown.

Sam smiled because of it. Sam had always smiled because of it. “Maybe take it apart again?” 

Disgusted, Dean grunted.

The lost little spider gangled her way up Sam’s bolty wrist, quickly going to work in laying down her translucent ribbons, elegantly making him her prisoner.

Sam pet her again and thought about Dean’s typewriter all throughout his breakfast prep, the crickety old black Remington with rust corners and water damage, smudgy lettering. They’d found it up in the garret during the last week’s rummage and Dean’d been frenetically obsessed with the thing, determined to bring it back to life once more. 

There was something of a keynote in there that Sam, nor Dean, wanted to look too shrewdly at.

But it was just a habit Dean had been adopting awfully often. Finding perished things and returning them to their former splendor. Part of it was nesting, but the other part of it was therapy. It was Dean squeezing a putty mound and listing three positive things that happened to him today. Dean didn’t have to say so. He never had to say so.

So far he’d gotten the dumbwaiter moving along again, the rocking chair rebirthed and re-suitable for rockabyes, and even the snooty brass rotary phone had been rewired to receive calls. There was nobody left to call them, not anymore, but it was the principle, Sam was sure.

There were a lot of principles in their new life. They made up for the ones they'd never quite had — or adhered to — in the Before. 

In any case, the refurbished bouillotte lamp Sam kept on his night table was sparkle shiny again, and Dean smiled, when he thought Sam unaware, to see Sam fitting each arm with a tall, skinny, taper candle. Sam guiltily preferred his much more modern, loud-colored, flexi-neck reading lamp but.

Principles were important.

In the other room, he could hear Dean’s tools clinking metallically away again. Dean calling the typewriter an old bitch, setting to dig into her boxy guts. Sam grinned helplessly.

 

~

 

Of all the oddities in the house, Sam was decidedly least fond of Dean's fiendish little friend. 

The aquarium full of cannibal leeches that no one seemed to have fed for years, yet thrived and survived, Sam was okay with. Often in his restless sleeps he'd wander over to the lilac glow of the tank and observe, sadistically fascinated by the tiny carnages. They were in there eating their own kind, sucking them to death. Merrily feasting on their brothers.

The macabre decor of ivory statues with their misshapen anatomies only registered in the afterthought. Most of them sans arms, but some lacked their marbled skin too. Lovingly carved out spleens and knotty intestinal ropes thrown askew. One had teeth dangling in place of testicles. Sam actually tried to find out the sculptor's name. 

The grey mist that hung out in the dining hall was harmless, the bone replica hat tree was whatever. The night moans and the persistent child size 2 footprints and the cuckoo clock that never opened, that reeked of rot, like something croaked in there — all just nuisances. Sam's last name was Winchester. He'd seen some shit. 

But it was the cat that made him wary. Made a boy a hundred times its size sidestep, give it a wide berth each time he had to pass it. Made him look back over his shoulder once he had. Just, just to make sure.

It was dead, like most things that lived there. Like _all_ things that lived there, technically, Sam tried not to think. 

Dean hadn't liked it at first either, called it fugs and, boorish, spun it around so he wouldn't have to see that mort rigid look on its face, all agony scowl and cottoned fur, yellow-washed fangs. Cemented in some senile taxidermist's interpretation of a peaceful doze perhaps.

But somewhere along the wormwood way Dean had gone and warmed to the loathsome little creature. Thought to name it Chapel and took to speaking in coos, began petting it from head to tail on each pass "for good luck". Bizarre.

Sam Winchester alias Berkowitz — alias Dante — alias Page — alias Bachman, trained executioner and respectfully feared by masses, logically competent with an LSAT score of 174, Satan's son him-very-self, walked quicker around that cat.

 

 

“It’s just science,” Sam recalled Dean desperately repeating to himself again and again while Sam read blueprints and mixed elixirs in little jars. “It’s just science.”

Lots of backwards graphing and tricky percentages, bits in other archaic tongues, but all biologically sound — Sam had said out loud, pronounced and soothing. There would be routine maintenance, of course, man, procedures and re-threading and weird little mixtures digested from time to time, but — hey.

Forever’s forever, and always means for keeps. 

 

~

 

Covertly, Dean sang. Sometimes.

When he was wrenching and screwdriving (thrash metal), when he was in the clawfoot tub up to his chin in soapy suds, fragrant oils (croony cassette era). When he sat on the bench at the piano he couldn’t play and stared out the bisected first floor window, catatonically humming.

Dean sang and Sam listened and it felt distressingly like nursery nighttime lullabies. Like love that only happens once.

Dean used to babble to an infant Sam. Crawl into a tiny crib and coo little tunes, songs about sunshine and bitsy insects. It sent a cozy curl of purity through Sam, just thinking it now, even if he didn’t really remember any of those things. He was real little. Long before he got too big for Dean to want to creep into bed with. 

No, Dean hadn’t done that in years. Not in a lifetime.

Sam listened. Always.

 

~

 

It was nice out, on the day that everything changed. A dew mist afternoon, all pretty pinking sky and a film-opener horizon, the edges of the highway saturated with wildflowers. 

They rarely went out that far — twice a month, maybe, but it was all very visible from the victorian gabled attic window, now that there was room up there in which to idle and ponder and think thoughts you should’ve never started having about the only other living member of your family.

But living was a loose word, and Sam couldn’t help himself either way.

The house wailed and rattled and somewhere downstairs, Dean was being a noisemaker in that annoying-endearing way of his. 

A fluttering eclipse of moths swarmed in from the east, just as Sam’s name was being called, and gently, nearly apologetically, they blanketed half the glass. Pretty never lasted for very long. Sam knew that. He pressed a couple of fingers to the ever-cool surface and got up, left. _Sammy_ was his whistle, and also his reward. He hurried.

“Uh,” Dean said, once Sam had unspooled himself down the winding spiral staircase and was standing in his favorite spot in the world, the little tuck of shadow at Dean’s right.

“What,” Sam said, sharp, a little guilted from brother-brain syndrome. 

“That’s—” Dean nodded over at Sam’s collarbone. “Think you got a lil' somethin' there.” Sam felt little legs. “Spider,” Dean said helpfully.

It tickticked down the v of his shirt, perched on the third button from the top. 

“Hey, is that one of those widow ones?” Dean leant in unfairly close. Sam could detect a faint trace of him, fading bath smells and a boysweat that should've been bottled. Sam was a bloodhound for it. “It’s. It’s kinda got a fat ass?” 

It was reddish and tickle soft, still in the newborn phase and mostly pellucid. Cute in a generally non-threatening way. There weren’t many threats left though, for them. Doofily, Sam wondered if it was the same crawler from earlier. 

“What’d you need?” Sam said softly, careful not to jostle his new guest. 

“Oh. Oh yeah.” Dean touched around at his nape, a breakup speech duck of his head, and then cricked out an elbow. “I think we might need to. You know. Quickie Mart. Soon.”

Sam went necrosis stiff, all over and at once. “What.”

“I just—”

“What is it? Does it hurt? How long have you known? Dean, let me see—”

Bratty, Dean bat Sam’s hands away, said fussily, “Cut it out, Sam. ‘m fine. No need to call in the maggots yet, jeez. Just. Just.” Sam waited him out, tense. “Part of you’s blurry.”

“Dean.”

“Yeah.” His boot scuffed against the dusty flooring. “Don’t think a pair of readers is gonna fix it either.” Shaky sigh, pulled right up from the gut of him. 

Sam so selfishly gave himself a handful of mourning-veil moments to grieve, thought about how Dad always said one of baby Sam’s first drooly words was ‘gree’, how his most reached for crayons were the grass-shades, how he was so, so young that southern summer Sunday when he looked into Dean’s eyes and just knew— 

Sam swallowed down his sick and started to plan, stoic and steadfast and very sore-hearted.

When he was in the library, Sam allowed himself to think of Bobby.

The library with its rolling ladder and velveteen parlor chairs — baroque, Sam shaped out, once he’d settled on the right word for it from the heavy tome dictionary in his lap.

But it was all the old familiar smells that seeped into the psyche. Wet wood and rubbed leather, aged book. The scent of knowledge just waiting to be known. 

The heapy ol’ house over at Singer Salvage was set to be demolished some years before, but Dean went to combat for it and really, nobody in the world fought harder than Sam W.’s big brother. Dean was the inspiration for _you should see the other guy_. 

On the outside, it was an eyesore pest. Inside, lived about fifteen different worlds. All perfumed with old sweat and bad booze, okay, yes, but it was a core comfort, once.

Sam used to be able to call any one of a hundred numbers and know that an old drunk-mouthed redneck would be picking up on the other end, all rotgut whisker hairs and full of fondness for a pair of orphan boys. Now he said Bobby’s name aloud to nothing and no one, and wondered if anyone out there heard him at all anymore.

 

 

The chill nights set in earlier and earlier for them. 

It might've been the seasonal change shifting, or maybe it was something to do with living so near the cold swamp, just a few acres down past the swirly wrought iron gates fortressing their finicky old home from common wanderers and pamphlet pushers. 

“The fuck were those hacks teaching you in Cali, Sammy? It’s the altitude.”

And Dean was — well, he was right. He was partially right anyway. They very nearly walked the clouds; a hilltop home and so neighborly with the low hung ghost moon. 

Resignedly, though, Sam added the bonechill in along with the flowers and the bugs. Because none of those were the reason why it was so cold. 

 

~

 

Sam walked the south wing at 3 o’clock in the morning. 

It was conveniently the furthest away from Dean’s room but not solely why he sought so much quieted refuge in it. 

The skinny scope of light from his phone wasn’t necessary, even when the house was at a dead dark. Five good months of solidly living under only one roof would do that. Sam could let his lashes touch and only bump into a wayward vase or two — and that was only if one of the other residents was toying with him. They got bored so easily.

Sam neared the end of the hall and set his phone down on a teetery table for a little bath of light. He paced and thought and nibbled his entire bottom lip into his mouth. 

When the rug beneath his bare feet was burning down to its threads and Sam’d finally chosen to just go back to bed and let the morning’s sun bring in some optimism—

“What’s he done this time, child?” someone said. 

Sam sighed, ran a hand through his hair, tugged at a tangled noose of it near the back. 

“Nothing, Bess. It’s not.” A few clumps pulled loose in his fist. “He didn’t do anything. He just. He’s just.” _Dying_ , Sam choked back. 1) because it wasn’t true, not in that sense, and 2) because it was too ugly a thing to give voice to. That just — wasn't an available option. 

“Little Winchester, what is it?”

Bessie lived in his favorite painting. In her nice fancy satins and her big ruffly hoop skirt, she was dollish in a reserved way. Her prim umbrella in one hand and her beheaded head in the other, held daintily near her tipped in waist. A special beauty. 

Grim husband she'd wed, was what Sam gathered, and one who paid the artist handsomely for his idea of a fine portrait of his wife. Sam didn’t take too much wondering in why she'd smothered him in his sleep some years later, in a room just half a dozen doors down. 

But anyway. 

“It’s his left eyeball,” Sam said stupidly, and then sat down on the floor and whispered the whole of it to her. 

She knew about them, about what they were. Most of the lurkers and leftbehinds did. But not everyone knew that—

“You’re in love with him,” she said when he was done, pinprick sharp, looped into a bow.

“Yes,” Sam said, two hours later, flat on his back, blinking all lazily stoned teen up at the high, ornate ceiling fixtures. “Yeah, of course, that all makes sense. And I get it. It’s just.”

“There’s no other green like it on earth?” she said, kindly, repeating his own words back to him.

“Exactly. And I can’t just plop in some kiddie lover’s brown one and call it good. Oh god.”

“Shh, shh,” Bessie shushed at him, but it sounded like she was rolling her eyes at a vigilante organ thief, a pushing puberty boy traipsing about over his first crush.

 

~

 

When it came down to the bones of it, Dean actually chose the place for them. That creaky, leaky, bed-buggy place with horrors at its very birth-roots.

Sam only mentioned the hoodoo priestess out near Shreveport a couple of times, and that was, god, it had been years before — but Dean had stayed a little fixed on the idea even after it turned out they no longer needed her, needed anyone but each other. It was the Bourbon Street beads in Dean’s vision, probably. 

But they went.

And they found. 

And tucked on the edge of a little Louisiana town was an “honest to God haunted mansion, dude, look. Bet it’s crawling with creepies.” 

It wasn’t really. Or at least Dean didn’t think it, not when they first shambled in with their salts and their silvers and their homegrown assassination techniques. 

The haunt-o-meters stopped being a tool when they realized the things lit up shrill for them. That was a putty mound day, for Dean.

So they'd crept and then they'd peeked and at last, when they’d cleared each room, Dean took a tallying look around and clicked his teeth. He said, “Doesn’t look occupied to me, bro. Whaddya think?” What he meant was, _I could probably live here. Could you_?

But lush shrubs and rooms with views had never been deciding factors, not for Sam. As long as there was one (small) (6’ 1”) thing in the house with him, any place could be a home. So Sam took his cue and blew a teen queen sigh through his bangs, frowned, and said, “I’ll get the duffels.”

 

~

 

When he'd slammed the trunk closed that day, arms full of wardrobes and weaponry, stole a look up at one of the high windows with the billowing curtains, he could see Dean’s darkened silhouette, still and then gone in two coldfog breaths. _Shhhh_ , the house said.

It hadn’t escaped Sam once that there was a great big slug of a water source nearby, just like the bible of Benton suggested. 

 

~

 

They weren’t alone, not quite, but haunted didn’t drape quite right on the hanger. Too stuffy, too stale. It was inhabited, and that was comfortable enough a word for Sam.

Everyone had been really nice to him, anyway. Even the ones with their craniums missing.

 

~

 

Sam took the long way back to his room. 

Bid Bessie a good night and curled his way through the cobwebs, walked on ghosted toes back down the hall and through the upper parlour, danced boneboy fingertips along the swirly bannister rails. Looped around to the other side of the manor. 

It wasn’t insomnia. Mostly it was a fit of love. 

It was what happened when twinsouls were suddenly and cruelly no longer sleeping in the same muggy room of the Lucky Lady Motel with plumbing smells and rattling wheezes; under the same metal roof of the same lifelong mobile home.

Sam used to complain and curl his lip, choking on contempt, and however many forevers pass now he’d give very really anything to have backed up sinks and late 70’s aircon, would lop off a hand — even if it couldn’t be replaced — to fall asleep squished between seatbelts and ashtrays, with Dean softly hmming Enter Sandman just to be a fucker. 

But those were things Sam couldn’t ask for.

He’d asked for enough.

So that night, as every night, Sam floated the floors and found himself twisting his hands in front of Dean’s bedroom door, worrying at his lip again, imagining what he’d say if Dean woke up, if Dean saw him, if Dean wondered why he was blushed and throat-clogged and pressing his huge, huge hand to hold down his huge, huge cock.

Sometimes he’d lean against the heavy door or if feeling momentarily brave touch the skinny knob, inch it half a turn, go still, listen, wait. But that’s all that'd happen. That’s all that could happen. 

Dean was Sam’s brother, and that should've been permission enough.

Sam leant down, breath held, eyes stinging, and lined his pupil up with the curved keyhole silhouette, stared in and in and beyond. Dean slept peacefully and Sam rubbed fitfully and in the morning, they’d be Sam & Dean again. 

Sam was Dean’s brother, and that was why he needed to be quarantined. 

 

~

 

Once upon a life, Sam had been jealous over Dean’s girls. 

Of their sweetjuice scents and their sun-soft hair, of what those things did to his brother. Sam never wore his envy well — clown red splashed across kid cheeks — too hormonal and petulant to be anything other than childish with his slurs and his sulks. Even Dad could tell.

Unfortunately, fortunately, the man’d been too busy sussing out latent evil to unbury the one that sat neatly behind him in the backseat of their big black home on wheels.

John always thought Sam was jealous of Dean. He didn’t know to think Sam might be jealous of the dolls.

He wasn’t anymore. It wasn’t like that, now. Jealousy felt too silly and too simple.

An ugly hunchbacked truth, but — should some flowery thing have come along and by will or happenstance caught the attention of a doe-eyed boy with muck in his nailbeds and a fuck-you-all-night smile, it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still be dead in 100 years. 

Sam wouldn’t.

The spider was plipping about on his carotid artery when he woke.

He gentled her onto his plankwalk fingers then placed her high up on his shoulder, went about his morning customs and quirks with a tiny someone to talk to. She listened finely.

He wasn’t really sure that she was a she but he thought that maybe Dean was right. The little ruddy spot on her butt was starting to look like a messy heart shape. He called her miss. 

Sam, when he was drizzling syrup over Dean’s banana pancakes, said, “We’ll go at the start of the week.” Monday was a nice full-circle crisp beginning.

“Why not just head out tod—”

“Just give me the weekend,” Sam said, declining to look at him. His own voice sounded wooden and full of scare. 

Dean was quiet for a long, uncharacteristically pausing minute, and Sam knew he was thinking. And Dean had always been an ace at puzzles. They used to do the 500 piece ones over long missing-father weekends, when Sam was stubby fingered and Dean was a 9 year old hero.

Mercifully, Dean didn’t speak his findings out loud. 

No questions for why Sam needed an extended string of hours with Dean while Dean still had both original peepers. No slapped on laughter or turning Sam’s heart into a punch line. 

Dean took his shortstack and said it looked good.

Sam ate his tasty beige oatmeal in little dabs and tried to figure out when Dean’s eye started slowly whiting out without him noticing.

 

~

 

On Saturday, Sam ventured outside to sprinkle birdseed in the tiny houses and tried his winning best to forge a grin and act like everything was nice and neutral and normal. 

 

~

 

Crawl spaces were bigger in the times when homes like theirs were built. Pillared and musty, and with hardly enough room for more than the literal and non-literal skeletons of back when, but still big enough for the average sized person to almost stand up in. Winchesters had to crouch. And Sam Winchester, especially, had to stoop nearly in half.

It was a place he visited maybe not frequently, but often enough that it was some sort of soothing — tender-touching at the neat little labels on the glass containers all crowded together on the shelves, repurposed jelly jars and screw top jugs; each of them done in Sam's own handwriting. 

There was **Dean — March 7, 2019** and **Dean — 8/03/33**. Occasionally a **Sam — Dec. 12 '28** would wander into the mix. There weren't as many Sams, though. Sam was a lot more heedful with his body.

In a carefully concocted solution lived a piece of Dean's aorta — crushed to nonfunctional after a nearly failed hunt tracking a pukwudgie, and a small slivery muscle from Dean's upper back — following a knockdown brawl with a goatman descendant that ended bloody for both, but bloodier for Billy boy, and Dean's original liver, bulbous and wan — simply having lost the losing battle against Dean's teenage-headstart affair with Jack and Jose.

All floating in a blend of ratioed out formaldehyde and methanol, plus a few other necessaries pinched in, and Sam thought of the bitty room as a sort of memorial altar; a slapped together prayer house. Someplace quiet he could go and lay proper adoration down. The kind Dean would never accept in waking life. 

But Dean's discarded fleshy fragments, they were _real_ fond of Sam. 

Sloshing against their little glass homes as he approached, bubbling in their baths, straining to reach out to him, _Sam Sam Sam_...

 

 

If he looked at it as saying goodbye, Sam didn’t think he’d be able to go through with it. Not when it was a part of Dean that was so _visible_ , a part that Sam had spent so many smitten moments lost in. 

The whole thing, the magic pill and Best Brothers 4ever thing, was Sam’s idea and this very much wasn’t the time to be getting emotionally squeamish. Dean had brave-faced for Sam all his life. Now it was Sammy’s turn, that's all.

 

~

 

On Sunday, the morning before they locked up the house and drove off in search of a new body part, Sam realized, when he was in the middle of what might've been the comings of a heart attack following Dean’s muttered comment about becoming Mary Shelley's monster, nothing would ever be what passes for normal for the two of them again.

 

~

 

“Dude, we gotta do something,” Dean said, sighing and flopping, sprawled on the lumpy couch during a mild locust swarm that left them blinking in the black, electricity gone out for hours by then. The bouillotte lamp had come in handy. “Entertain me.” 

Sam crinkled his nose and kept trawling through news sites, horribly checking to see if any of the critical care victims of gone-wrong burglaries or life dealt terminals had photos attached to their stories. It felt like grave robbing before a body had gone blue.

“What about rummy? Or, ooh, strip rummy?”

Scroll, scroll. 

"Strip Bloody Knuckles?"

Sam shhed him.

“Strip _Uno_.”

“Dude, barf. We played that when we were kids. No thanks.” Now he was getting revoltingly warm between the legs. 

Dean cackled and the house seemed to stir with it, unasleep and newly interested. Sam moved onto a coma patient not expected to make it through the next few nights.

“Strip hide’n’seek?”

Sam, sweetly not pointing out the lacking logic, narrowed his eyes to snakish slits. “Why does everything have strip in front of it?” 

Dean sleazed at him. Sammy flushed and frowned and lowered the brightness on his phone so Dean didn’t see him changing colors, cherry cheeks. 

“Alright then, prude Jude. How about we—” 

“Jesus. Count the stars or something,” Sam said, snappy, busy clicking and skimming, then felt a rush of red hot remorse so strong he dropped his phone.

But Dean — adorably bored Dean — found this funny, chuckled low and loose while he closed his poorly eye and turned to look out past the glass. 

“Two, four, six, there’s eight, nine and ten, oh hey, is that the Pistol Star?” The grandfather clock turned over to midnight. “Nah, nevermind, that looks like a scrotum.”

“Dean,” Sam said, like an apology. 

The moon was huge, slung seductively low, and with the windsor lace curtains flapping like gauze on a gust, Sam could see every shard of glittering gold in Dean’s open eye. It was exactly as bewitching as Sam had ever known it to be. Dean kept the pretty card up his sleeve, and he’d played that hand more than once or thrice. Sam folded, always. 

“...thirty-three, fifty-two, can I stop now?” 

Dean was squeezing and unsqueezing his socked toes, quaintly counting like an obedient thing, and Sam reached over much too soon before he could think why he maybe not ought to, and grabbed Dean’s working mandible, held it tight in his grasp and said, “Yeah. Please stop.”

Dean sort of stunned himself into silence and that was all perfectly fine because when Sam forcibly turned his chin so they were facing each other, Dean’s mouth was still open to a pink little hole. And Dean shaping words — especially when he was stoned or stupid or stubbornly fighting sleep — had always been a slightly erotic thing, for Sam. 

So Sam couldn’t say for sure that he’d have been able to keep himself from putting a very nonfamilial kiss right there, this time, that night. 

“I just—” Sam said, quiet like funerals. He looked into Dean’s eyes, both of them — one peridot stone and the other a paling mint — and smiled all too truthfully, too softly.

He didn’t finish and Dean didn’t make him. Sibling blood was so powerful. Not everything needed a decibel to it.

Dean let Sam look at him in completeness and they sat this way for hours, staring and smiling, just watching each other. Little _hey_ s and _shh_ s, and it wasn’t boring at all.

 

~

 

The power zombied back to life before a purpling dawn and Sam — having spent too long and never enough counting the precise amount of pulse-ticks it took for the black in Dean’s eyes to eat out most of the moss in direct correlation to Sam scooting an inch, two inches, closer to him — felt rebirthed.

The lamps humming back to bright and the fans whirring up again were some kind of signal, a stopping point in their intimate exploration.

Sam was breathing unevenly when he stretched and cricked, when he stood up to say, “we should go to bed,” and it tumbled out rough and lead-weighted and lewd and not at all how he meant it. How he wickedly meant it. “To sleep,” he said, bumbling a clarification, and that only made it so embarrassingly, glaringly worse. 

Dean said, “yeah, yes, let’s do that”, just shy of shy, and he followed Sam all the way up the rotting stairs, where they parted at the top and walked in opposite directions. 

~

 

Thirteen. 

It had been thirteen seconds from the time Sam shifted nearer until Dean hit full demon dilation. 

 

 

Dean was sleepy-pretty and he outright wouldn’t meet Sam’s eyes the next morning when they lurched and dazed out of their bedrooms, when they wound up in the flickery kitchen at the same time. 

Sam said, “waffle?” and Dean said, “make it two” and Sam nodded and Dean sniffed. It was five shitty, shifty minutes of too-quiet and overly calculated breathing while Sam let the ancient stove go warm. 

It was, peculiarly, how Sam used to feel when he was in 7th grade and he’d wake up gummy in his shorts, half lingering in that marshmallow state of dream, very clear on what he’d just been getting wet to: a swath of summerborn nose freckles and an engine purr voice saying _it’s okay Sammy, we can just run away._

He’d turn gingerly onto his tum, count to a full hundred, and have to go sit at the foldout formica table listening to Dean crunch Apple-Os, watching Dad circle obits, Sam having to pretend his thighs weren’t creamy and his face wasn’t flamed impossibly ruby from it all. If Dean so much as said his name on those lustful days, Sam'd need to vanish to the toilet for a spell, come out mumblingly citing some, um, lactose stuff. Sam had lots of dairy problems in those years. His family was just too busy in deathfights to notice.

Only none of those mornings or memories or moments ever cited _Dean_ being just as puff-breathed, as fidgety, as Sam.

"What," Dean said, when he noticed Sam's inventorying scrutiny. 

"Nothing," Sam said, and burnt the first batch of waffles. 

Dean's shoulders were in that prickly posture of his, and his ear-tips were the shade of baby peonies. It was all very bridal. Including the part where the ball of Sam's thumb brushed Dean's wristpulse in the plate pass and a sound so like a gasp trickled out of Dean. Of _Dean._

Dean overcompensated by wielding his blunt 1930's butterknife at his food like one of the trunk's machetes.

Sam realized, between sips of grapefruit juice, that Dean was wearing the aphonic face of someone who damnedly knew they almost got the bejesus _and_ the bedevil kissed out of them the night before. By their little brother.

 

~

 

"Gonna get in the bath now," Dean said, informative, rinsing his chipped bone china plate. Sam, drowning deliciously in his thoughts, looked up from his fruit spread in time to see Dean padding back upstairs, soft as a schoolboy's daydream. 

Sam wondered if that was on purpose. Sam wondered if Dean, outrageously, _wanted_ him to get that clear a visual; he could've just said get ready — he usually said get ready, right? Sam wondered what the rules of this current game were, exactly. It kind of felt worryingly like strip poker.

 

~

 

The mood, however, was esoterically there. The wistful smell wafting by in an unexpected place mood. Elementary gluesticks, a mother's citrusy floral. A photo snapped years ago that’s by some means still developing.

The house trilled, watching them, listening in. Sam had to snipe at the rocking chair Dean fixed that was suddenly rocking excitedly, told it _cut it out_ , and then felt like shit for it. It could've been someone's sweet gran that expired there.

"Sorry," he told the chair awkwardly.

Sam rolled his pants and shirts up military style, wedged them into his bag. Zipped his toiletry case closed on Crest, Barbasol, made sure he had at least three pairs of thick socks. Dean pocketed a couple of rosaries, one threaded, one with chain, smaller hunting knives. Put on his good steel toes, outfitted each ankle with something sharp and sinister and sure to have his back in a bind. It was foreboding in a nostalgic way. 

In a way the bulk of humanity might have felt towards things like treasure box rewards after a dentist's visit and that one crucial teddy bear; towards something as warm as an uncharred childhood home.

Dean said “all set?” in the same haste he’d have had when those words carried the weight of _Dad’s almost here_ on their back.

Sam's class played Operation on his first day at kindergarten. And his mom didn't have a chance to pass down certain morals.

"All set," Sam said, and didn't forget to bring the chloroform, the sedatives, or the medical grade braided sutures.

Car keys in hand, Dean wandered chummily over to Chapel and Sam got a breath of morgue air on the back of his neck just watching his brother scritch under that mummified chin.

But that reminded Sam. 

He unlatched the cabinet and rooted around until he could pull out the littlest teacup, rushed back to his bedroom with the toy-sized thing in his XL hand. He dumped a scoop of half-alive beetles into it — the scuttling trespassers that kept finding their way into the house — and set it on his bookshelf, arranged it dainty.

Sam said, “Goodbye, miss” and grinned lopsided at the little (growing) spider that shimmied down her bondage ropes to go curiously investigate his present.

“Be back soon, I think,” Sam called out down the hall towards the south wing and heard a singsong encouragement float back to him.

He let out a twitchy first-date kind of breath, then darted out after Dean, the rumble that lit the panties off an unknowable number of barely legals already shaking the brittled leaves off the dying rosebushes. Dean bleated the horn. Sam cursed.

And as he was yanking the manor’s heavy double doors closed and locking up, he heard curious burbling sounds from within, delighted cheers from spectrals trapped in vanity mirrors, frozen inside shabby sad walls. 

“Something’s happening,” a little girl’s voice said, choir wholesome but off, like it was clogged with cockroaches. “Something’s finally happening! Oh, look, they’re going on a romantic roadtrip toge—”

Sam ran away hastily, embarrassed. 

 

 

He couldn’t actually look at Dean until a mile after they’d exited the high steel gates.

"So," Dean said.

"So," Sam said.

Dean fired a bullet of a look at him. Sam's gaze slid away. If Dean wanted to talk about Sam's loveletter touches, he could bring it up himself. 

Sam might have the heart of a hellion, but nothing Sam had ever faced had been as solidly imposing as the boy who held his babyfat hand when they crossed the street. Or a third as beautiful.

 

~

 

Sam crunched into a slightly wilted salad he lucked out on in the refrigerated sections at some Sip'n'Save a few towns back.

Dean swallowed down bits of pink coconut pastry and started talking about Le Bestia. He asked Sam if he could guess how many kids, just off the top of his head, Luis Garavito butchered. 

"Um, more than a hundred forty-seven," Sam said, confused, baby tomato juice on his lip.

"Nice," Dean said in a game show host voice and closed his weak eye against the glare of the sun.

 

~

 

On I-49, Sam remembered a loup garou they'd snuffed out somewhere around here, some time in '98. Dean almost lost a leg from the knee down and Sam was inconsolable about it for weeks. It was the first time he didn't talk to Dad for more than three days. That had been a big deal, then. 

 

~

 

The Honeydrippers were crooning over the airwaves when Dean, with his elbow out the window and a two fingered lock on the steering wheel, said, "This is nice."

Sam slot his pinky in _Zollinger's Atlas of Surgical Operations_ and scanned around, outside. It was mostly tall, tall trees and sludgy bodies of water, the kind of bodies that could hide a body. A couple of casino-slash-gas stations. An afterlife themed bordello. "What."

"Not that," Dean said, not needing to look over to know Sam was puppet-blinking at him. "This." Forehead lift. " _This_."

"Oh," Sam said, oh, because _this_ meant birth rights and a life lived in mile markers. This meant them. "Yeah."

And it was, kind of, a little, nice. Between the din of quagmire insects and the funk of left-to-broil carcasses polka-dotting the white lines, it maybe even felt like that was who they were still. Who they were once.

They were on their jovial way to mutilate a perfect stranger, but even so. That was details. Toss on a jaunty, $1.99 pair of rose-hue lenses from the truckstop swivel rack and it was a sweltering July day again, Sam's yardstick legs loping out the back window and gaining gold by the second, Dad and Dean having the classic Turn the Page squabble that nobody ever wins. Sam's musing on high school credits and escape plans and undoable, illegal love and Dean's tossing fond looks at him over his band-tee shoulder.

Sam turned the radio up and they flew past a _World's Best Drive-Thru Maque Choux_ billboard. _EXIT 6 MILES._

At any rate, Sam's vision had always been a singular shade of red. 

 

~

 

Just past the Wemple area, Sam came awake to the sound of train rumblings. He pushed hand-heels at his lids and Dean asked an inoffensive,

"How far are we planning on going?" 

It made Sam scoot up in his seat, think crazily, nastily, just for a demonboy second, _all the way_. Made him croak out a dogged, "what" that sounded like it had three question marks and a prayer nailed onto the end of it. 

He'd been having a milk dream again. Dean was saying his favorite kind of pie is cream.

"Been driving almost two hours. Where we goin'?" 

Sam didn't know. None of the possible donors he'd found were viable. Or viable enough. Not to Sam. "Tell you when we get there."

 

~

 

"Irr-u-matio," Dean said, like a dropped conversational thread. 

Sam almost had it worked out, the difference between the retinal blood vessels and the optic nerve, how to tell them apart once you're really _in_ there. Because there was hardly any point in putting on lipstick if you didn't have a mouth. It was making a lot of sense to Sam, actually, so he nodded, bit his lip, kept reading.

"You know what that is, right?"

Sam had still been in pull-ups when he overheard his first _Christo_. Sam moved on to page 115 and said, "yeah, like a blowjob," before he startled at the sound of his voice, what it was they were talking about. His underarms felt wet.

"Mmm, kind of. More like mouth rape," Dean said conversably.

"Is this," Sam croaked. "You been watching gore porn again?"

"So anyway." Dean, pink across the cheeks, went irritated. Taken out the garbage and nobody noticed the smell was gone. "Edmund Kemper was a big fan of that." A small red box of chocolates at someone's door that got stepped on before they got noticed. "Guy tore his mom's head clean off then put his meat between her teeth." 

" _What_ ," Sam said, even though he knew all that. That wasn't what he was what-ing. "Why are you."

"Forget it," Dean said, and grinned the grin that meant his feelings just got hurt. Sam didn't have a cool clue what he did.

 

 

For three towns, Dean was weird. 

Weirder than usual, for what counted. Couldn’t grow up fingerpainting with hex potions and conducting at-home autopsies on things that were never supposed to be real life and not turn out a little weird. 

But he’d stopped singing his songs and started swaying to the shoulder and he was being very, scarily polite with Sam. 

Dean had been a gentleman exactly no times in his life so Sam, laced with new worries, put his how-to guide away, tucked it safely under his seat, unstuck the webbed hair from his forehead and was opening up his drying throat to ask if everything was okay, to say it was okay if it wasn't, to say you can tell me, Dean, you can say anything to me, I won’t unlove you for it. 

But then they were waltzing out past the solid stripes and the marshes were blurring and in a matter of teethgrinds, they'd come to a crunching stop that told Sam just how perfectly bad it was. The vultures that had been following them since they'd left home contentedly circled the balmy air above the Impala.

 

~

 

"Oh fuck, oh shit, oh fuck, fuck me," Dean said, more paling and sickly over the car's cosmetic injuries than he'd ever been for any of his potentially mortal own.

Sam closed his eyes, peptalked himself up, and thought _this is it_. He calmly walked over to Dean's side, rubbed the hook of his elbow comfortingly, and nudged him over to the safer, passenger door. Dean's mouth fished objectingly open. Closed. 

Sam got behind the wheel and said something out loud about the next place they saw, that was the one. He hoped it wasn't a sunshine daycare or a home for the deaf, nothing like that. But if it was, then it was. 

Dean's eye was filming over. 

 

~

 

In the next six minutes, Sam lost ethics like strands of hair.

He got desperate. And then driven. And almost began _hoping_ for children or the nonhearing. 

Both usually had sharper, fresher eyes.

 

 

St. Maryjane’s Cathouse was a two-story cherry red building with a wheelchair ramp and a stripper pole and it was strung year-round with blinky rainbow Christmas lights. 

It smelled like incense and whore. One of Sam's favorite whiffs and one of Dean's. 

Unlit catholic candles lined the windows, weeping soul music escaped past the walls. There were two dozen vehicles outside when the yellow-eyed boy and the green-eyed boy came peeling into the gravel lot so boldly it set off car alarms in a magical, glowing wave.

“Wow, didn’t think you had it in you, puppy,” Dean said, asshole, when he was punching his door out and staring all agog at where Sam had brought them. He had a smile on, but it dimmed off when he saw Sam wasn't dressed in a matching one. “Did, did you find someone?”

Sam had already bullied his way halfway into the lobby, holding Dean by the hand and crassly yanking him through the tables of married men and disavowed priests, through one-timers and every-nighters, through infants and ancients, before he grit, “yes.”

"Oh yeah?" Dean said. "Cool." He tried to sound cool.

Set up like a half-bar and half-movie theater, and Sam went to tell a lady named Carla who was womanning the front booth that he’d like a room upstairs with a lock on it, clean sheets preferred but not required and that he needed it to be empty. 

Empty empty.

“You’re a cute one,” she said, tucking a strawberry coil of hair behind her quadruple pierced ear. Her accent was thick as her makeup and she was either chewing gum or chewing chew, but she looked like the kind of girl who wasn’t gonna spit either way. “None of our boudoirs are without love, sugar. Pick any dame ya want. Chrissy’s free.”

She snapped the air and over came a ghouly girly about the size of Sam’s leg, a little slip of a thing, more mascara than meat. 

“No,” Sam said, low and throatslit. Chrissy’s eyes spasmed widely in a perversely attractive way and she was smart enough to flit off in another direction, pink fur coat and candy crop top gone in a vanish.

“I don’t want anyone,” he told Carla. “I just. Me and my brother.” It sounded wrong, sounded right, and, “look, we just need a room.” Dean hadn’t let go of his hand, not yet.

“This ain’t that kinda place, shug,” she said, not quite as venomless as before. Not nearly. “We get down in lotsa ways here, see, but we don’t get down like—”

Dean squirmed, vestal and darling. 

“Just.” Sam took a calming breath. Murder came too naturally to him. “Lady, I just need a fucking room, alright?” 

“Well hey now, you’re in the right place, babydoll," she said, cold as a queen. "All of our rooms are fucking roo—” and Dean cut in with a whispered, pleading, “Sammy,” but no. Please nothing. 

Sam gouged around in his backpack full of medical and massacre equipment, pulled out his currency. A sweaty wad of big bills and a rose patterned wartime handkerchief containing a small but special cumulus. A rodent tail and some potent herbs, a vial of grave dust plus three gold teeth, a baggy of rare butterfly eyes, one set of twin fetal skulls still attached. 

These were voodoo towns, here, and Sam knew exactly where on the map he was. 

She looked at the stash and looked at Sam. Looked at Sam's Dean. Cast a witch's eye 'round the room to see who was watching — everyone, no one — and rattlesnaked her head around 'til she found a skeleton key hung on a titty tassel keychain.

"Room 6," she said, gumsmack, and tucked it into Sam's waiting hand. She ran a leering eye from the angel gold of Dean's hair to the mud-cake of his boots, said, "Don't make too big a mess, sugarpops."

"I won't," Sam said. He would. 

She swiftly scooped her deathtoll fortunes into her little velvet purse and Sam had Dean up on floor two before she'd snapped it shut.

 

~

 

The door had a trio of sixes instead of just the one. Sam wasn't surprised. Dean walked in backwards. 

"For good luck," he said at Sam's crimpy face. In the lightsplash coming from the pink-bulbed lamp in the corner, Sam could see that he was scared, that the curl of his mouth had gone stiff, that he didn't know what to do with his hands, that he was trying really hard to make it funny when he said, "So'm I gonna have a slut's eye?"

Sam had known more than Dean in school. Not in everything, but in some things. Dean would parentingly lean over books on subjects he knew nothing about and would accidentally help Sam figure out the wrong answer. Sam learned by the 2nd grade how not to damage something as small and sacred as a Dean-feeling. 

Sometimes Sam would even hand his homework in that way. Just because, because Dean.

Sam said, soft-smiled and sincere, "you've always had two of 'em" and he said "I won't fuck you up, I swear," and he said, holding his dampened chloro-cloth, "for good luck," and leant in and kissed Dean the way brothers didn't, closed eyed and open mouthed, frantic and big and in love. 

He smothered Dean unconscious before Dean could not-kiss him back. 

 

~

 

"Another one?" the barboy asked, swatting a rolled up newspaper down onto the counter, gut-spatter squash. "What's with the fucking flies today?" Two more plunked down near Sam's drink. Thwap, thwap. "Promise it ain't always this bad, buddy." He topped off Sam's frosty mug, mumbled something about dirty rubbers, uneaten gumbo.

Sam shrugged, drank, wiped his lip, wanted to say, _don't worry, it's not you, it's me_ , wanted to apologize for the fat green flies. But he didn't really have the energy left in him. He drank more.

Dean was still upstairs, a passed out princess on a brothel bed, the loveliest thing in the building and the only thing not for sale, sleeping off the after-effects of a mostly sterilized procedure, when someone sat down next to Sam, disheveled and wincy, softly smelling of spunk. Two hours ago he pulled out his brother's eye.

"Been a night, hasn't it?" Chrissy squeaked, then tossed back a cup of something the barboy handed her. She got her gorge in order, tried again, and sounded like a songbird when she said next, "A real night."

Sam glanced down at her, at her matted doll hair and her smeared gloss, and gave silent sympathies.

A wormy man down the stool-row was crooning vulgarities at her, letting her know just what he wanted her to suck off his where, saying _hey ya little dickslut, you ever tasted a man's asshole_ , miming crudeness with his tongue and fingers, and not being very discreet about any of it. Said he was a paying customer, remove me, like to see you try.

Chrissy blew the air near her face, tapped a press-on fingernail to her knee. Another worknight. Sam heard and saw and slushed his beer around.

"Well now," she said, when it was crystal ball clear Sam wasn't a talker, when she seemed to notice he was alone alone, in the way he wanted empty empty. "You sure did a number on your — um, your friend, huh?"

Sam swallowed down what was left of his medicine, left a good-sized good-samaritan tip, said "yeah I did," to the little gum machine girl and went off with a chasm in his soul to check on his patient.

 

~

 

It was the door opening that pulled Dean awake and the door shutting that dragged him upright.

Sam busied himself with locking it from the inside, stayed in a shouldered-in curve, fiddling with the bronzed key. Sam bent over to adjust a scrunched down sock, to swipe a thumb over a shoe smudge, to let his favored floppy hair screen him in. Sam wasn't a believer anymore but he said five Hail Marys nevertheless.

He could hear Dean shifting on the sheet behind him.

"Oh, dude," Dean said, wonder-voiced. "I think it. I mean, I think you did a good. Wow, I can read the tag sticking out of your shirt."

"Perfect," Sam said, wishing he'd worn shoes with laces so he could pretend to tie them.

"So how'd'I look? Am I all heterotrophic now?" Bed sigh, floor creak, Dean was vertical.

"Heterochromatic," Sam said, small but smiling, and he admitted, "no, not too much, really." He didn't turn around to check. It'd be a good fit. "As long as you can see, that's what matters."

"Yeah," Dean said. "But check me out." And Dean was all sorts of full on zeal and zest, tromping to the weakly lit bathroom with the smeary small mirror. It didn't fog over, at least. 

Dean gasped anyway. A half born thing pushed out into the night.

Dean Winchester knew one set of colors just about as well as Sam Winchester had always known green. He came out of the little room, blinking and ghostsick dull, and he said _Sammy_ in that dog-whistle voice so Sam stood and Sam turned and Sam raked the hair off his face and didn't hide the patch covering his eye anymore.

 

~

 

"Take it back," Dean said, after he'd hacked up what little road food he'd eaten into the toilet bowl that had seen probably really much worse.

Sam, laughing maniacally, almost offended, said, "I'm not taking it _back_ , go to Hell. I did it, and it's done, and it might not have been fucking brain surgery," ugly giggle, "but it wasn't exactly a stroll. You're keeping it." Foot down, arms crossed.

Dean looked like he maybe would kill Sam, if he could. Breathing hard, Dean approached. He squinted. He said, "show me." Sam shook his head.

"Show me what you have in there," Dean said, menace. 

Sam wove away, took a swallow that became a gulp, and sat down on the uncomfortable edge of the by-the-hour bed. "I can't," he said, church quiet but unrepentant. He'd have done it again, too; partially hollow-skulled as he was. "There's nothing yet. I mean, I still need to find—"

 

~

 

"Don't watch. You — you probably shouldn't watch."

"Are you sure you can do this?" Cold.

"I," fumbling, culpable, "I've done it before." Scant hours before.

"But not on yourself."

"I'm fine. You can wait in the other room. You don't need to see this, really. It can get—" 

" _Sam_."

"Okay."

 

 

The house, when they returned, felt different. Held in somehow. Grisly gifts absent on the high porch, zero bloodcurdling messages in the mist. Best behavior, prim and barren, as though, deceivingly, nobody had ever been slain and stashed in the root cellar, or found hanged in the spacious front coat closet. The house was aroused with hope, awaiting conclusion.

Though nothing Sam wasn't expecting, bracing himself for even, they'd driven home, Dean commandeering the wheel again, in a silence so heavy it weighed the beater in Sam's chest down. Gone were the inexplicable mass murderer stats and gone was the leathery, over-hairsprayed music Sam was raised up on. It had the air of a funeral home wake. 

Once Sam flipped down the visor mirror, just to see, caught glimpse of an okay looking set. One was a forever-borrow from a larva of a man that probably could've done with a tongue removal, too. Eye was fine, though. Clean and keen, nice tusk white sclera. 

Dean made a noise, a shocked, hurt little thing, and Sam slapped the mirror closed, left off looking at his mismatched self. His insides felt even wronger. A mad Dean was only a sad Dean.

And the house, when first Dean and then Sam split at the fork in the stairs, again, yet again, went unquietly mad. Blew out shutters and yo-yo'd the wallpaper, banged beneath the floorboards and caterwauled into the hours of unrest. It left oily black pools on the rugs, forced centipedes out from its foundations. The house, wrathful and choleric, spoke to them in the only way it could. 

And that's how it went for three dismal, miserable days.

 

~

 

Sam took to strolling the soils of the estate during the sun's hours, expansive and full of secrets to shovel up, acres of unhallowed ground to explore. There were monstrous things that lived down in that lake, their lake, that'd be a wet-eared hunter's wet dream to take out.

Sam, instead, left his brown-edged moribund roses on each cross wedged into the ground that he passed, a stem per life come and gone. Just for something to do, something small and nice. He ran out after two dozen. There were a lot of bodies buried beneath his feet, in the family plot. 

The Sam from five decades ago might’ve lost sleep wondering the true number of perisheds, how many other graves there actually were, unmarked. But not this Sam. This Sam was much too busy with a grief so strong he could've just knelt down and died right with them. He could have, if he could have.

And under the moon, Sam would lay uneasily on his back on his wide, grand, ten-pillowed bed and bluely wonder what his brother was doing over on the other side of their dream home.

 

 

“Why do you cry like this, boy?"

Sam, not used to having random paintings talking at him, paintings that weren't his Bessie, his friend, wobbled on his un-ballerina toes. And stumbling over his instinct to retort, Sam said, “I — I don’t cry. What are you. What.”

The twirly mustached man three turned hallways away from Mrs. Bessandra Von Goetz shifted in his uncomfortable looking high-backed chair, chin up stately over his stuffy collar, ribs held in by a double-breasted waistcoat. He looked like Albert Fish, and he said, grumbling, “you’re crying right now.”

Sam blinked into the empty husk of a hallway. His eyes were tight, and dry, and he hadn’t laid a salt river down yet. So, “no,” he said, tighter, drier, “I’m not.”

Behind him, a cackle spat out, shivered the hair on his neck. 

Wheezed out and mocking, the someone else said, “Can you believe this yellow child almost lorded Hell’s palace?”

Sam spun slowly around. The unimpressed stare of a toddler stared back at him. A black and white stillframe gone to time-washed umber and the coifed little boy holding a dummy doll sat sturdily on a stool, chubby legs poking out forward. 

“Ex— excuse me?” 

“Yellow, I said,” said the voice, and it was coming from the _doll_ , Sam could see now, and it jeered him further, onward. “Cowardly. Look at him. Tall as the sycamore tree my daddy hung from and yet so hollow a razored wind could fell him. A tragedy on legs.”

Sam turned again, back to the twirly man who was at least a little bit more cordial, and the man, cordially, turned his nose up at Sam.

“Okay,” Sam said, absurdly talking to the tot's toy, “I don’t know what your prob—”

“You were the Antichrist, you fool!” the doll shook angrily, cutely, in its trap of overbearing child-arms. “Do something, do something.”

“About what. With what,” Sam said, baffled, eyebrows all squished together.

The doll clunked its head side to side, distressed, and told Sam very slowly, very lowly, “about your betrothed that dwells in the maiden’s suite.”

“My—” Sam said, then, “oh. No. That’s not. He’s not.” His heart lurched. “We’re just.” Sam flushed, conveying through awkward shoulder slumps what he hoped was answer enough.

“Oh, fiddle. You no longer wish to make coitus with the fair one, then?” mustache said, clipped, betraying the tentative friendship Sam was sort of relying on. 

Sam gasped. 

“You do,” dolly dearest said, wooden eyes glaring pointedly. “You do!”

“I—” Sam looked back and forth between them, pulse flying at his throat, and said "I can't." Shook his head, wrung his hands. Said to his toes, said to the portraits, "He's my brother." Then waited.

"So?" cried the doll, voice no longer in human timbre. The hundred-year-evil inside the doll laughed. "You take the bitch of the beast and you put it on its knees. You claim it with seed and make it obey. The King's true whore will know its place. And a King will take what's his."

Sam chuckled uncomfortably, twisted a curl near his nape. Yanked. "There's not gonna be any, uh," seeding "and I mean. He's not really my whor—" cough. His giggling turned hysteric, fast, when the doll, mad-minded, bellowed an echoing, "Kings take!" and so Sam said again but with more strained emphasis, "he's my _brother_." 

It sounded terribly meek.

The doll groaned.

"The scandal in our railroad town was the son of a coachman," Albert said, helpful. "1878. Made haste with his father's grandest prizes, the old man's carriage and the old man's daughter. They turned up some years later, some towns over. They had six perfectly healthy brats." He swiftly and stuffily returned to portrait stone, done with Sam Winchester's love life. 

Pretty pink mortification crawled all over King Sam's face.

 

 

In the morning, Sam had a love-hangover again. 

It sat along the ledge of his frailest organ and tiptoed him over into nausea and belly aches if he let himself linger in his dreamworlds too long. It was hard to say goodbye at first light, pleasurable as they were: Dean pushing Sam's head-o-snakes hair out of his eyes, saying frustrated, fond, "messy." Dean sitting dozily in Sam's lap while Sam read a book on victorian witchcraft, their breaths and the page turns the only sounds. Dean blowing him a bratty kiss the way he had when he was 12 and Sam was 8 and small-boned and easily ruffled.

Sam's wants were mammoth but his dreams were modest; mostly he just dreamed of Dean wanting him back.

It was a Wednesday and Sam had chores to do. Mundane, natural things in a life as unnatural as his. Chores were good distractions.

Sam rose. He fuddled through his teeth brushings and his shampooing, combed his hair with a set of heirloom brushes he enjoyed the look of, ate alone. Hiding in plain sight had always been a Winchester survival skill but Dean had gone completely underground this time. Sam only caught sneaking snatches of him.

A scent in a room he'd just walked out of, when Sam entered. Sallow hair rounding the end of a dark corridor, extinct in two blinks. Recently rinsed dishes, the after hum of something switched off. Piano string still stubbornly clinging to the air. Dean only sat at the baby grand when he was tic-jawed and thinky.

Sam dusted the statues and straightened the picture frames, and in an afterthought, he pulled the typewriter into the library for a private dissection.

 

~

 

Somewhere upstairs Sam could hear music. Soft and drowned like little ghost giggles, but there. It sounded, for a second, like — like Fool in the Rain, strangely. Then it scratched, then skipped, then the decelerated drone of something faulty. Foul tampering. He put it out of his mind and didn't let it back in. They didn't even own that one on vinyl anyway.

At first Sam couldn't figure it out and he couldn't figure out _why_ he couldn't figure it out.

"Why won't you work?" he said, frowning at the teeny tinkery parts. He tapped a contemplative nail-nub along the paper release lever. "Are you haunted?"

The typewriter didn't answer him. 

It sat in pieces on the small writer's table and the little red-heart spider snoozed beside it all. It quickly grew to be evening, cold kissing at the windows and everything going to shadow, Sam still wrist-deep in the mechanics of his project, sweat in his brow hairs, his lip in his corner teeth, and at midnight Sam said, "oh my god." He laughed.

He knew what it was, now. And so stupid, too. It was. It was just—

Sam popped up so furiously his hepplewhite chair yowled against the floor and Sam took the stairs three at a time, climbed like his 8-legged girl up the attic ladder, dug through the crates, the boxes, until he found the right one. And on the way back Sam forgot to be solemn and silent and sorry. He almost took the boy who lived on the other side of the manor clean off his feet, oh hey, um, hey, fuck.

 

~

 

It spooked Sam before it soothed him, just — just seeing Dean's freckled over face again, finally again, and he said, "oh, I." _You look beautiful,_ , he thought, shut down on fast. His lip went back into his mouth. Dean narrowed his eyes. His eye and Sam's eye. Dean just looked really good. And really catastrophically berserk.

"Uh, okay, look," Sam said, voice surrendered. His throat worked hard. "You don't wanna talk about," _the eye_ , he gestured to his own, there on Dean's face, then winced, "or talk to me right now, that's okay. I get it. I really get it. I should've told you first but I was — I was _afraid_ , okay, and I couldn't stomach the idea of you walking around wearing someone else, and I. I had to try, you know? To see if maybe—"

"You kissed me," Dean blurted, big-eyed, hands going clenchy at his sides. Sam stepped back, struck.

He hadn't thought they were going down that unlined road. Not ever. Squirmy emotional discourses weren't a Dean trait. And all Sam was these days was an emotion, a thousand of them, and he'd went and laid them all down into that kiss. It was _Dean_. 

But "guilty," Sam said, crass when cornered, not fully sure what might come out of him. His breath was looped strangely. He could feel his temples throbbing drum fast. "I meant to do it."

Dean crumpled. Face, posture, hands falling limp. He opened his mouth, Sam watched him open his mouth, and Dean said, "Why," paused enough that Sam thought there might be space for an answer, didn't know how he was ever supposed to say, how he could possibly tell Dean about— when Dean said, "How could you do that to me, Sam?" 

It was the bad-omened wall that Dean spiked before he left his crime scene, stomped off and away on a sigh and a curse, but it felt like Sam, chalk-outline Sam, took the whole hit right between his lungs. 

 

 

"From this most unbecoming angle you have two options, my gentle love," Bessie said, rapping the tip of her umbrella, affable and warm. He hadn't even known she was eavesdropping. She usually didn't. He squeezed at the little tub of purple powder still in his hand, almost quashed it without concern. "Hide, or seek."

Sam smiled politely and slid down her wall. He didn't expect her to know about this. It wasn't. Dean wasn't. Life with Dean had never been anything as simple as a boyish flirtation. 

He tried to tell Bessie, tried to say _yeah, but see, take your swingset crush, and your first love, mix in shared parents and full blood, then suppose this person is also your caretaker and your partner, your protector_ , and you'd do anything to protect them from harm — even when, especially when, _you're_ the harm, and it all should've just stayed six feet buried. 

Bessie, widening her sultry-set eyes, lifted her head a notch higher on her arm. She said, impressed and a little envious, maybe, "Well, that's something." Sam nodded. It was doomed at birth, of course. "The kind of something, had I known a thing like it, that I wouldn't be standing still with my head in my rear wondering dimwit what-ifs about."

She fluffed her skirts.

 

~

 

"Dean," Sam said, running down the maze of halls, then again when nothing came back to him, "Dean!"

It wasn't a scream exactly, the kind for bedtime boogeymen or good-time girls, but it was a little frantic, piercing.

"Dean, come back." Opening up forever-locked doors and throwing open naggy windows. Like Dean might've scaled the siding to get away. Sam paused at the top of the stairs, trying to figure out which way his brother had gone, if he'd come this way at all, if Sam should just give him his space, let him have his own peace and release and undeviled deliverance and—

"Hey," Sam said to the cat, unsure. "Hi?"

His brother's dead cat was looking at him, _looking_ at him, and it tussled its whiskers, abominably blinked. 

Sam crept away, hands up cooperatively, halfway through his _hey buddy, I don't want any trouble, heh heh_ speech, when the cat opened its maw, its misshapen, mangled maw — and smacked a gummy yawn. It stuck a paw out in front of it, after, owled up at Sam, astute.

Sam, Stanford full-rider and fluent in seven languages, went with, "uhh?"

The flimsy limb crept out a hair more so Sam put an uncertain hand out to bop it. Maybe. The cat hissed warbledly. 

Sam snatched his uncut fingers back, looked around the landing. A tiny set of crooked claws sprang out, clicked against the flooring. Sam said, "right," moved away, whispered, "I'll get going, I think," and the cat slammed its ghastly, mostly-bone little tail down, reached its foot out further. 

Sam followed the foot, followed the next logical path, aimed down the once extravagant staircase. He heard craggy purring.

"Oh. Do you mean." Sam was talking to roadkill. "Are you trying to tell me that he's, that—" Tail thwap. 

Sam, before tumbling down the stairs in a mess of fear and excitement and swallowed down hearts, said, "th-thanks, um, Chapel. Thank you," and didn't look back to see the kitty corpus curling into a tight, happy ball. 

 

~

 

The library door was swung wide open.

Broad shouldered and back turned, Dean stood in Sam's most favorite room like an overly pretty hallucination.

"Why do you have this?" Dean said, gripping the little workstation Sam had set up. He didn't look backwards, didn't look at Sam. He said, full curiosity, "What are you doing with my. With the typewriter?"

"I," Sam's hopes tumbled around in his chest. "I wanted to fix it." For you. "I just wanted to see if I could." Make it better, make us better, show you this one thing and make you smile. "I dunno."

Sam could hear long pulling sighs from the nose, could hear Dean clutching at the wood to splinter it. And Dean said, "why here?" He turned, Sam in the room now, too, Sam uncertain and not wearing any socks, holding a little container of maybe magic dust in his hand, dumb, and Dean said, 

"Why do you come here so much? Is it to get away from me?"

"What. I — what. Where? Never." He didn't know what he was answering, not really, but Dean was the only thing alive in the world that Sam wanted to be near, always, multiple forevers.

"Your library, man. This room. You're in here more often than—" Dean sounded choppy, unrehearsed. And Sam was flying unbelievably off the cuff also when he said, "It reminds me of life, I guess." 

The old life, the good life, the life when Bobby threw out words like _mythos_ and _dogma_ , pointed John's boys in the direction of an old study, said those double volume chronicles weren't gonna read themselves; when dad used to drop Sam off at the public archives, drop Dean off behind the skating rink, and Sam would sit in the stacks and wonder whose pants his brother's hand was wedged down tonight, read up on Bundy and Bathory and thought for the first trickling times how he could probably kill one of Dean's bubblegum dates. If he wanted. Just if he wanted.

And with his heart sitting high, Sam abruptly understood Dean's curious ramblings, in the car. Sam loved serial killers and Dean loved Sam. He was trying to speak in Sam's own language.

"I don't, like, hide in here though?" Sam said. Out of the corner of his eye, a book quivered on a shelf. "I've come in here once this week, actually, today, um, now. So."

"I don't mean recently," Dean snapped. Dragged in some air, struggled on, "I mean ever since we moved in. I mean since I pushed the door open and said 'hey look, Sam', and you. You."

"I?"

The room felt clouded with breaths, overcrowded with listeners. 

"You hardly remembered I lived here, too."

" _What_." 

"It's true, Sam, shut up." Dean looked uncomfortable, and Sam felt — muddled, not following at all. Vortexed, no compass. "It's either here, or the attic, or under the goddamn house, what could you even be doing under. the. fucking. house. But it's just. You do that. You wanna be anywhere," soft, damaged, "where I'm not."

Sam tried suffocating his laugh, ramming it back down where it belonged, but it bled out noisy and real. Dean flinched, hard, scowl coming defensively in, and Sam said, cruelly petty, "Maybe we can switch your brain out, too," and everything died on Dean's face, went stunningly nil, and Sam thought, _no better moment, rip it off, say it clean_ — 

"I don't just wanna be near you. I'm sicker than that, Dean." Hell pit sick. Spread leg sick. "Didn't care that it was selfish. Still don't care. I've _always_ wanted to be part of you," Sam said, thinking of the leeches. The word obsession had been one of his favorite elementary discoveries. "And now look. I'm inside of you." 

He didn't move when Sam came in closer, not when he was a strangulation or stab wound or snuff out away. He swallowed, stayed still, watched Sam come. He was whispering over and over _you're inside me_.

"It didn't hurt when I spooned my eye out. I felt it, but I didn't _feel_ it." Dean's lashes were cornsilk, up close. "I couldn't let that in. It wouldn't come anyway. I loved you too much that night."

Sam loomed over him, a gangly armed thing with one eye burgeoning yellow, both feeling hot tar black. Dean always had a soft spot for one monster. 

"I love you like that every day," Sam said, more afraid to keep it in now than to let it out. 

 

~

 

In the soft streams of nocturnal light limning through, Dean was Sam's every nasty little wish, pure, polluted, privately born with no help from outside evil. 

Face moon-soaked to pallid perfection, summer spots dappling over the bitty knob of his nose, around his ears, the wine-sip of his lips, fat, hanging gently, devastatingly open. A sculpture all Sam's own. Sam's breaths felt wet and rude, godless.

"I've been really good, Sammy." He was holding onto one of Sam's forearms, holding him away or holding him close. Sam couldn't tell. Sam didn't care. "For — for so long. All your life."

"The best," Sam said, honest. No man better had lived.

Dean shook his head, spoke to Sam's chin when he said, "No. I don't mean — but then your mouth was there on, on mine and then you were putting me down and I woke up on a perfumed pillow, fucking unnerved, and I. God, Sam."

"I'm sorry," Sam said, and meant it if only for the way Dean's eyes shone wet. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Two fingers to Sam's lips, smudging him silent. "Don't be. I'm not. It's just that I can't really stop thinking about my little brother." 

"About," Sam tried to say, mashed weirdly.

"About, you know, the stuff I never could leave off thinkin'. Front seat, top bunk, five classrooms down. About his super fucking girly kiss," tiny nothing smile, wounded animal eyes. Come close but be kind. "If he'd do it again. If he'd never do it again. If I could live with it, if he didn't."

"Dean."

"Cuz he's not sick," Dean said, firm, first sibling decree, and tugged his fingertips away. The hard cover book fell off the shelf like a swoon. "Or at least he isn't sick alone."

 

~

 

Maybe the house was watching. Maybe it was there for it all.

Maybe the scrubbed-gone gore bulged up behind the wallpaper again when Sam put his forehead to Dean's, when Dean said _you can, Sam, I want you to_. 

True, too, that maybe the cut-and-ribboned ringlets trapped in the jewelry box began their uncoil when Sam did as he was asked, was told, when he opened his brother's mouth up on the red end of his tongue. 

And maybe also the drapes flew in, and the lights killed out, and every door in the place slammed open and closed, open and closed, maybe those things all went on for three cacophonous minutes in excess. Sam stopped registering those sorts of things as soon as Dean's hand was cupped behind his skull, slipknotting into the wild of Sam's hair.

Kissing Dean was as thrilling as Sam's first sloppy smother, the frantic struggles of something try to live when it knew it wasn't going to get to.

Dean was a filthy fucking kisser, nothing at all like the docile by comparison little thing Sam had placed upon him in a black-arts sex parlor, and he used every single part of his mouth to twine his victim. Sam's spider would've been proud, mean little miss.

Sam, when Dean was done with him, felt more like he'd been through a brawl than an embrace. So Sam, ever an addict for things he wasn't supposed to have, got hooked fast.

Kissing Dean was a new infatuation, the kind for traced out hearts in notebook margins, and for blood pacts, and a yearbook photo of a boy from a school he'd only gone to for five weeks taped into a dollar store composition diary.

 

~

 

He figured out the difference in affection and devotion somewhere just beyond the long pale of Dean's throat and halfway to Dean's bent-funny knees.

"I'm sorry," Sam said, though he wasn't, not when he got the worn soft denim of Dean's pants spread wishbone wide, had him sprawled all ungainly and indelicate on the fusty old fainting couch Sam loved to lie on and thumb through paperbacks, bloodwritten old poetry leaflets. His thumb nudged the zipper split open and Sam wasn't sorry at all. 

He whispered his sin between his brother's confessional thighs. "I've wanted to do this for so fucking long." 

"Sam," Dean said, fizzy gasp, shuttered stare. Sam was tugging meanly at the jeans, not satisfied until he'd gotten at least one leg free. He didn't care enough to bother with the other side. Sam liked the slutty way it made his brother look, his pants dangling off one naked ankle, vulnerable, a blaspheme solely for him. 

Affection was the responsive little hum in his soul when Dean bought cherry tart scented bath soap because it was "on clearance." Or when Dean picked _pumpernickel_ as a code word because he said it sounded gross and made up. 

Sam's hands were huge on Dean's hips. Bony and raw and just, big. Effective. In a spoiled-child tantrum, he jaggedly halved Dean's boxers down the cotton middle, elastic hanging to his middle like a harlot garter. And Sam yanked that down, too. Dean had always let him get away with a lot. 

That's what babies did. 

Spoiledly, Sam smiled.

Pretty as Sam knew he'd be, down there, subtly pink and splashed with faint little flecks. "Oh my god," Sam said, staring, stupid. Dean squirmed, so Sam just held the warm curl of him down harder, warningly. 

Affection was when Dean showed up to all of Sam's soccer scrimmages even though they weren't half as important as the cryptid research Dad was already on his ass for not doing.

His knuckles skimmed the smooth curve of Dean's cock and Dean trembled like a dog from it, immediately, gut sucking satisfyingly in. 

Gorgeous, gorgeous. Sam couldn't believe, and also could completely believe, that Dean was this distinctly gorgeous _everywhere_. Dean had stood in the lit-match glare of Sam's embarrassing and undiluted hero worship all Sam's life. Of course he'd reach every one of Sam's unreachable dreamboy standards — and keep going.

Above him on the couch, Dean was making all sorts of lovely noises. Mostly swallows and pants, some butchered out approximations of Sam's name. And Sam hadn't even really touched him, not really, not yet, but he said, not in a threat but not in a query either, 

"Gonna kiss you again," and he worked one of Dean's thighs easily open, pressed it to the seat of the couch, said soft in his mouth, genuine, "please stop me if I shouldn't do this." 

He bent his neck down — Dean's hands flying in a panic to Sam's shoulders — and pressed his lips to the fluttering pink center of Dean, full devotion. Dean clung, but didn't push. He didn't push once.

 

~

 

With Dean's thighs bow-tied around his head and Dean's held-back whimpers hanging by the teeth, Sam ate him and ate him and ate him, to the point where it drew weeps from them both, Dean's sore little hole all rose bottomed, Sam's aching jaw wanting to unhinge for complete consumption; cannibalistic, hungry in love.

"I miss you," Dean sounded truly afraid, sounded beaten, conquerable. Human in a way he rarely showed. Sam kissed deep into his ass. "I miss you so much, Sam." 

Sam licked his mouth, licked Dean off his mouth, closed his eyes like a pervert. Dean's gasps were eroticisms in themselves. Sam, to the crux, knew exactly what Dean meant, how that felt. He missed Dean too, even right now, even always. _We can just run away_. And they had. They _had_. Conned death, murdered for gain. Puppywet eyes, Sam had said please and Dean had said okay.

And Dean took lovely to another level, then, stretched wet around three thick fingers and sighing so perfectly for more. All Sam had was more.

 

~

 

"I liked it," he admitted, little boy lost and found into Dean's neck. "When I did it." 

Dean couldn't talk. Maybe that was why Sam chose to say it, wedged solidly into the blushiest part of Dean's body, fucking him so full and so good and just like Sam had always known he could, if Dean gave him a chance. Dean was taken apart to the vessels now. 

"It made me hard, Dean," Sam said, blushing wretchedly, groaning when Dean shifted his hips, wrapped a loose leg around his back like _stay, stay_.

Dean had leashed him up so long ago. Even when Sam had bolted, the chain choked him back in place eventually. Sam sunk in, didn't move, kept himself right where Dean needed him, ground in and down, made Dean sigh for it, made him leave drippy little footprints all along his own little belly.

Life span wrung Anthrax tee rucked up sweetly, Dean's porn-hot mouth slid open and Sam couldn't help himself from stealing back in for his fix. Dean responded eagerly. Deep, spit-soak. Dean loved kissing Sam, too.

"I. I got so hard from it," Sam said, between tonguings. He was so wonderfully far up in Dean that Dean could only just barely keep his eyes open. But he watched Sam closely, happily. He arched lazily up, all fucksoft and sideways on the couch. Sam sobbed. All that slicing and splicing.

"Cuz it was me?" Dean asked, stuttery. His cock was pearly wet at the tip and so, so strained. 

Sam rubbed at him cautiously, still in a heartbroken awe that he could touch, like this. Dipped his fingers all through the runny mess of it, so warmly soppy when Dean made an even bigger mess, weak hands at Sam's wrists and a delicious little scream filling the room, and Sam kept rubbing until Dean's wet became clear again. 

Clear as the lonely kid tears Sam would wipe away before anyone could see.

Sam stuffed his fingers into his mouth. "Cuz it was you."

 

 

The library smelled like sex for two full days.

There were splotches on the mustard velvet of the couch that Sam decided he'd never scrub out. Nonfiction stacks toppled over to small, neat ruins. Dean's destroyed underwear tossed to the side in a nasty little wad.

Sam couldn't help walking in, often, just to inhale.

 

~

 

Waking up alone had been — offputting. Noodled out on the floor with his pants at his knees, surrounded by his books instead of his brother. 

He felt the swell of his mouth, hot and used, the sweaty knots at his nape like someone had been clutching at it in a fever, a death hold while they got nailed to the cross by something enormous. And the soreness of his cock, adamantly waking. How it felt firm and a little injured, the tight, heavy twinge in his groin. A fuck well done.

Sam lay his head back down on the long rug, geometric and floral, plums and golds, and felt fine with the idea of his brother up in his secret passageway bedroom, tending to his wrecked little asshole with soothing ointments and kind, mild fingers. Slipping one in and remembering how Sam had been there.

Sam tucked the honeymoon panties into his pocket, pulled his pants back up and slept a little longer, let Dean adjust to the idea of actualized incest. 

 

 

"I did it," he said, and tried not to sound so obnoxiously giddy. He teetered back and forth on his heels and toes.

He wasn't looking to be pet at or coddled over or even congratulated on his efforts. Sam was just a kid who found joy in topographical mapping and learning the y coordinates of the points on curve C whose tangent lines have a slope equal to 1 when curve C is 0.25x2 + y2 = 9, who ate lunches on the bleachers, a bag of Lay's chips and a pear, a forty-chapter criminology textbook just for fun. That kid finally getting to tell someone that the hottest guy at last Friday's party drunkenly made out with him in some girl's basement.

"You — you told him?" Bessie said, coming awake in a shift. "You told him how you—"

"I fucked him," Sam said, breaths coming out big, blush bold on his cheeks.

Bessie rolled her disconnected head in her hands, perplexed, and Sam bit his lip, horribly amused from it. "I don't, I don't understand. Is this — this is a good event? Was he upset with your doings?"

Sam scratched his elbow. "Uh, no. I think. He seemed to," quiet cough, "enjoy our, our time together?"

"Together?" 

"Yeah, yes, that's what we. We—" 

Sam remembered Dean's little advice column chat with him in a puke pink lodging near crumbled old Elkins, West Virginia.

How Dean said _if you can't talk about it, you shouldn't be doing it_ , noogied him, how Sam had thought it was an oxymoron of their life, how Sam wanted to touch the cupid's bow on Dean's smile even then, and Sam still couldn't quite tell his painting BFF that he slipped his brother the bone and loaded him up creamy white.

Sam made hand gestures.

"Oh," Bessie said, hair-raised but beaming buoyant. "You two had a joyous coupling? Oh little Winchester, that's absolutely storybook. I'm so, I'm so. I could just lose my head. Oh dear."

 

 

Sam had slept most of the autumn afternoon away, through brunch and lunch and almost last meal. He hadn't seen Dean all day. But he didn't worry. His brother was probably passed out on his clean-sheeted queen, pampered and fatigued and mottled with love bruises from the jawbone down. Soulmate sex was excellently exhausting. 

 

~

 

"You gonna tell me what we're doing in here, man?" Dean said, a little guarded from being pushwalked into the library. Like Sam might strip him nude and sit him on his dick again. Sam _might_ but he wasn't going to, probably. He wanted, he had to show—

"Okay, ready?" Sam said, voice stupid sounding even to him. He was just uninterruptedly _happy_. It was an unusual feeling. "Watch this. I think it'll work."

He'd straightened up in here a little, righted the books and fixed the furniture, thrown a quilt over the couch to cover the— he'd tied the curtains picturesquely back, cobbled the typewriter back together. He sat Dean down on the hepplewhite chair, resisted touching him for more than a beat, palms clammy, unbrushed hair, said, "um, okay."

Sam cranked out the sheet of test paper they'd been using. He set it flat to the table and it was still blank over every inch. Dean's brows lifted lightly when he looked at Sam. He looked like he didn't want to poke holes in Sam's balloon animal.

The purple powder was finely milled, kind of shimmery. Dean scooted closer when Sam unscrewed the lid off. He peeked into the tiny tub in Sam's hand, whispered _what is it_ , but Sam was already dipping a paddle-tipped little painter's brush into it, swishing it around, coating it.

"Whoa," Dean said when Sam was done dragging the brush over the page in long passing sweeps, edge to edge, exactly what Sam had been hoping would happen, the dumb delighted look on Dean's face. He couldn't properly savor it though, his own face doing some sort of collapsing thing. 

"Was just mystery ink," he heard himself say, cloggy, head full of bugs, the powder disclosing everything typed onto the page.

**S S S S S S** over at the top, Dean's first frustrated tries. Another row of the same letter. Then Sam's attempts next: **D D D D**

Back to Dean's. Sam having left for the kitchen. When Sam was collecting eggshell bits off the counter and wondering what they might have for dinner that night, the next night, the next four decades, if Dean was ever sorry for having said yes, stuck with his buzzing pest of a little brother for the next evermore. Adding jerusalem artichokes to the grocery list.

**S S S S**

**Sam Sam Sam Sammy Sam Sa m S A M s am S S S s s ammy s** and on it went. All down the page.

Dean grinned clumsily, freckles shooting out stark through the pink. "I can't believe it was working, that it was—" capturing. His tests, pointless and unthought, simply the first thing sitting on his brain at all times, easiest reference, favorite letters of the whole silly alphabet. And he said, fond like in Sam's dreamwishes, "you and your magic tricks, Sammy."

 

 

Under the house was another sorrowful story. It wasn't very cute, or done in ode, or anything someone with a normal heart might look at and do something other than put their back to the wall and try to run. Dean had wanted to know, though he probably hadn't wanted to _know_. 

Down in his Dean shrine, Sam ran a toe through the dirt. He worked a piece of skin off the downward curve of his mouth, didn't deny what he'd done, what Dean was crouched beside him and staring at. The collector's jars of his pickled parts, loved in secret. 

Sam didn't say, _if you'd died, I'd have kept what was left of you_ , really died, for good. He didn't say _I'd have carried your body to my bed and laid with you every night_ , he didn't say _it was you or no one_ to Dean's prettiest profile. Dean looked around interestedly, squinted, set his hands on his ripped-jean knees.

Dean said, "kinda Gacy of you, man," and Sam, breath caught clouded in is chest for so long, rushed out a laugh, a smile so stained with relief his dimples pinched painfully. "Is my other eye in here, then?"

But "no, no way," Sam said into the quiet curve between Dean's ear and his clavicle, Dean's arms brothering around his back. "I can't keep that in here. I've been fucking staring at it my whole life."

 

~

 

Crawl spaces like theirs were built bigger and that was good because it meant Sam could lay fully back, pants parted obscenely, underwear peeled just low enough on his hips to get himself out, big enough that Dean could rock in his lap, hands braced on the solid spread of Sam's chest, fuck himself down on Sam's overwhelmed cock, Sam's eyes going crossed from Dean completely _using_ him.

"Dean," Sam said, affected. His first little steps from a crawl to a walk. It sounded like three words instead of one.

His spine dug into the dirt and they maybe should've waited to get to a real bed, or at least a real floor, but Sam wanted him too much to object and Dean had already been fondling the shape of Sam's cock, desperate, made him too drippy too quick, that Sam had no choice but to get fucked stupid in his little mortuary pit, trying not to fucking cry.

"Sammy," Dean said, sweet, guardian arms held out to prevent a scraping stumble. It felt like _I know, me too_.

 

~

 

He started making bigger birdhouses only a few weeks after that, commenced putting in a different sort of food. Chunks of carrion, highway-found feasts. Dean didn't actually mind so much all the decomposition around them, not like Sam had once, for years, thought. 

Life still went sour around them, and Sam knew it sort of hurt Dean's feelings, the wilt of the blooms and the hum of the flies, knowing it was them that caused the putrid and the pallor. But it wasn't all bad, really. Sam called it atmospheric. Dean withered a look at him, but it was surely surface layer bullshit. Some days were downright marital. 

They had to change the eyelet sheets a lot. A lot. 

And Dean was hymning metal ballads again, too. Just to himself, or to the cat. Nice, good Dean things. Like how every May 2nd he'd say, "fuck, Sammy, but you don't look a day over twenty-five," like every time it was clever. 

Yeah, Sam would think, yeah maybe it wasn't cheeping bluebirds and tittery little goldfinches in their drygrass yard but, y'know, the vultures seemed to like them okay. "But don't name them," he'd had to say to Dean, more than once. Sam knew they'd both be grieved to go, when it was time. When it was too many years suspicious to stay.

 

~

 

Dean found it on Sam's nightstand, nestled in among the other decay — the teacup buffet leftovers and the chipping belled clock that was stuck just past 5 o'clock that Sam thought was kind of maudlin in a lost time sort of way — the night of the furtive union beneath the wood panel flooring.

"Oh," Sam said, when they came back to his room. When he came back to his room and Dean came with him. When he bumped his shin on something that wasn't usually there, a swirly metal corner rack, tiered, all elaborate filigree and distressed paintwork. 

It lived in Dean's room and he liked it for organizing his most sentimental possessions. His first lady leg knife, a bullet casing that had gone through Sam's right arm when he was still shorter than Dean, that had come critically close to the brachial. Some old IDs, laminated photos, a license plate from the salvage yard that spelled out 2INPINK.

Sam didn't know what it was doing there in _his_ room, when he noticed a stack of faded tees, garage shirts. An extra phone charger plugged neatly into the wall, a flannel blanket. _Ulysses_ in paperback. 

"Look, uh," Dean said, rubbing the slant of his nose, the philtrum. "Just say the word and I'll scram. I don't have to stay. I just thought. I mean, I thought." 

Sam turned, and stared, and closed the door quick, and didn't care who was watching through the keyhole when he shoved Dean up onto the poufy four column bed. All day he'd thought his brother had been recuperating, but really he'd been _packing_.

And Dean only noticed, afterwards, when Sam was panting up at the caved ceiling and Dean was drinking down an orgasm — noticed that there his eye was, drifting aimlessly all milky green in a cleaned out honey jar set up where Sam could see it every morning. 

 

~

 

"Whore," a smug voice said on an insignificant Tuesday, Sam and Dean knocking shoulders in a dimly lit corridor, sneaking down to the fridge for a post-fuck snack.

Dean froze. "Did you hear that?" Instinctively, he got in front of Sam, snapped a look around. He grabbed Sam's waist. "You heard that, right?"

"Let's go," Sam said, voice like a snapped bass string, eyes wide and alarmed, then small and calculating. He motioned a throat slicing at the little harmless doll in the photo when Dean wasn't looking, too busy wielding his phone's flashlight around and muttering _what the fuck, what the fuck_.

 

~

 

The night moans didn’t go away, not exactly, but they were so certainly challenged. 

Every midnight when the moaning downstairs began, the moaning upstairs only grew more violent. 

...and the bed went bump, bump, bump in the night.

 

~

 

"Okay," Sam said, prom awkward, standing stiff next to a chipped vase. He readjusted his footing, nodded to himself. Grabbed hold of Dean's hand like they were doing this in a school hallway where everyone knew their singular last name.

"This is weird," Dean said, and it was. Sam felt weird, too. But puppyish and ready, also. "Are we actually going somewhere or we just gonna rot right here?" He webbed their fingers together. Sam felt eleven.

"Shut up, yes," Sam said, trying to be annoyed. He waited then said, different, shy like a handmade rose bouquet, "There's someone I want you to meet." 

He tugged Dean down the gloom and obscurity of the eldritch south wing.

**Author's Note:**

> to my sweet, sweet artist: thank you so much for being incredible and incredibly lovely. thank you for letting me write for your gorgeous art. thank you for being kind all throughout. you were such a dream. such a beautiful dream ♡


End file.
